Brocade Communications Systems 53-1001763-02 Zone aliases

246 Fabric OS Administrator’s Guide

53-1001763-02

Zone aliases

If a switch has broadcast zone-capable firmware on the active CP (Fabric OS v5.3.x or later) and

broadcast zone-incapable firmware on the standby CP (Fabric OS version earlier than v5.3.0), then

you cannot create a broadcast zone because the zoning behavior would not be the same across an

HA failover. If the switch failed over, then the broadcast zone would lose its special significance and

would be treated as a regular zone.

Delivery of broadcast packets to individual devices in a loop is not controlled by the switch.

Consequently, adding loop devices to a broadcast zone does not have any effect. If a loop device is

part of a broadcast zone, then all devices in that loop receive broadcast packets.

Best practice: All devices in a single loop should have uniform broadcast capability. If all the

devices in the loop can handle broadcast frames, then add the FL_Port to the broadcast zone.

The default zoning mode defines the device accessibility behavior if zoning is not implemented or if

there is no effective zone configuration. The default zoning mode has two options:

•All Access—All devices within the fabric can communicate with all other devices.

•No Access—Devices in the fabric cannot access any other device in the fabric.

If a broadcast zone is active, even if it is the only zone in the effective configuration, the default

zone setting is not in effect.

If the effective configuration has only a broadcast zone, then the configuration appears as a No

Access configuration. To change this configuration to All Access, you must put all the available

devices in a regular zone.

See “Default zoning mode” on page 252 for additional information about default zoning.

Zone aliases

A zone alias is a logical group of ports or WWNs. You can simplify the process of creating zones by

first specifying aliases, which eliminates the need for long lists of individual zone member names.

If you are creating a new alias using aliCreate w, “1,1”, and a user in another Telnet session

executes cfgEnable (or cfgDisable, or cfgSave), the other user’s transaction will abort your

transaction and you will receive an error message. Creating a new alias while there is a zone merge

taking place might also abort your transaction. For more details about zone merging and zone

merge conflicts, see “New switch or fabric additions” on page 261.

Virtual Fabric considerations: Alias definitions should not include logical port numbers. Zoning is

not enforced on logical ports.

1. Connect to the switch and log in as admin.

2. Enter the aliCreate command, using the following syntax:

alicreate "aliasname", "member[; member...]"